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It’s an annual ritual. Each year millions watch and comment on each year’s Super Bowl Ads: beer commercials, impotency drugs, Internet companies, colas and more. Each costing a whopping $76,000 a second.

But perhaps what was most interesting this year was the ad that you didn’t see.

MoveOn. org, an activist liberal organization, tried in vain to run an ad during the Super Bowl.

The 30-second ad, which was the winner of a national competition, was critical of the deficits being created by the Bush administration.

CBS, a network that claims to be the number one watched television network, rejected the ad saying the network will not carry advertisements that take a stand on controversial public policy issues.

“We have a longstanding, clear and consistent policy of not allowing advocacy ads so that deep pockets cannot control one side of a public policy debate, be it conservative or liberal,” Dana McClintock, CBS senior vice-president of communications told the Boston Globe.

Unfortunately, deep pockets have controlled what we see and hear, and this is the trend that MoveOn.org wants to change.

MoveOn.org, a non-profit network of over 1,700,000 online activists whose goal is to bring ordinary people back into politics, sponsored the contest that was judged by a panel of celebrities and included the categories “Funniest Ad,” “Best Animated Ad” and “Best Youth Ad.”

Out of more than 1,000 entries, Charlie Fisher’s “Child’s Pay” won the Overall Best Ad and the People’s Choice Winner.

Another finalist’s ad, “Bush Sucks,” shows an image of President Bush’s head sucking up shredded bits of paper with phrases like “Civil Liberties,” “Personal Freedom,” and “Jobs.” At the end a voice-over says “One man’s trash is our nation’s treasure.”

In “Child’s Pay” with the country twang of a guitar playing in the background, the ad shows unhappy children of different ages and races working tirelessly in adult jobs.

A boy washes dishes in a restaurant, a little girl is cleaning floors in a commercial building, another child works on a factory assembly line, a little boy hauls garbage into a trash truck, and a young girl struggles as a mechanic in a tire shop.

Then the ad fades to black and ends with the line: “Guess who’s going to pay off President Bush’s $1 trillion deficit?”

The Boston Globe described “Child’s Pay” as a “gentle yet powerful depiction of how hard today’s children will have to work to pay off the country’s mounting deficit.”

And this is the ad that CBS refuses to release to television viewers? The $1 trillion figure, largely due to tax cuts on the richest of the rich, is based on the administrations own estimates. And every economist would agree that deficits today eventually fall on the next generation.

It’s called “passing the buck.” Tax cuts today for the rich, i.e., those have funded the Bush campaign machine, and debt for the next generation.

But CBS is afraid to allow that message.

My guess is that CBS is actually not afraid of the truth of the message, but of the reaction of conservatives and regulatory decisions the administration might make regarding CBS and the networks.

What makes it worse is that Moveon.org raised enough money for the ad in small donations from citizens. And they raised enough money to compete against companies like AOL and Anheuser-Bush.

But CBS still wouldn’t run the 30 second ad. Talk about democracy.

Senators, newspapers, and over 20 members of the House of Representatives have complained about CBS’s decision. And more importantly, thousands and thousands of ordinary citizens have written and called CBS to complain.

But it seems democracy in action is something that CBS simply cannot handle.